The movie where Charlize Theron wowed the stunt coordinators: “This is special”
There aren’t many Oscar-winning actors who are known for doing their own stunts. Tom Cruise, Jason Statham, and Keanu Reeves can land a punch and leap off of buildings without suffering a scratch, but they aren’t exactly Oscar heavyweights, even if Cruise did moonlight as a prestigious actor in his pre-action hero career phase. Charlize Theron, on the other hand, is in a league of her own.
After winning an Oscar in 2004 for her leading role in Patty Jenkins’ Monster, she starred in the science fiction action thriller Æon Flux, in which she did many of her own stunts (including one which nearly paralysed her and forced the production to shut down for months on end). Since then, she’s performed her own stunts in multiple films, including Mad Max: Fury Road and The Old Guard. Interspersed between all these physically gruelling roles, she managed to pick up another two Oscar nominations, one for the 2005 legal drama North Country and one for the 2019 docudrama Bombshell.
At this point, her reputation for work ethic and rigorous physical preparation is the stuff of industry legend, and most stunt coordinators probably know what they’re getting themselves into when she joins a project they’re working on. However, even by those standards, Theron wowed the crew during the filming of David Leitch’s stylish 2017 espionage thriller Atomic Blonde.
Set in Berlin in the 1980s, the movie stars Theron as an MI6 agent trying to recover a list of double agents that the Soviets have gotten their hands on. It’s full of dynamic action sequences, as you’d expect from Leitch, a former stuntman who co-directed John Wick and has gone on to helm Deadpool 2, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and The Fall Guy.
According to Leitch, Theron did the vast majority of her own stunts on Atomic Blonde, which was no small feat considering its action-heavy script. One ten-minute sequence is particularly breathtaking, depicting Theron’s character punching, kicking, and flinging herself up a flight of stairs and into a room where she faces off against armed assailants.
“That stairwell fight that we created, that’s 99% her,” Leitch told People. “Except for a couple places where we threw [stunt coordinator] Monique Ganderton down the stairs.”
It took six weeks of training for that specific scene, and stunt coordinator Sam Hargrave was even more glowing in his assessment of Theron’s work than Leitch.
“She showed that she could do 10, 15, 20, 30 moves in succession without needing to cut or reset,” he said. “We were like, ‘Wow, this is special. This is unique. We need to take advantage of this.'”
Gaining such praise from two experts in stunt work is surely the greatest compliment a star could have when doing their own action sequences. In a 2017 interview, Theron said that her desire to do stunts is deeply rooted in her early training as a dancer. “I love storytelling through the physical,” she said. “I think it’s the ballerina in me, the fact that I started as a dancer. I’m not interested in doing stupid things, but I am interested in learning new things.”
